I had explained to my kids I was going to India; after coming back I showed them Kushal’s photos and the very nice Indic KDE posters and explained about vada and dosa and korma for breakfast and how to eat with your fingers; thank you to Pradeepto for correcting my technique in that. And so it transpired that at breakfast we ended up with “Papa, are you going back to India?” “Yes, for FOSS.in 2009, that’s next year.” “I want to come too.” “Ok, that’s wonderful.” “Except I’m going to bring lots of forks, because I don’t want to eat with my fingers.” Says the kid covered in peanut butter.

Thomas asked “why GNOME” and “what about HW accelerated video drivers?” in response to one of my previous entries; well, GNOME is what you get when you install OpenSolaris. The alternative is the 80x24 text console. Until we get KDE4 in there, anyway. On Nevada you can pick between CBE and GNOME - out of misplaced antipathy I might use CBE, but let’s face it: GNOME is more usable and feature-rich than CBE. As far as HW acceleration goes, I have no idea how to tell on an Eee 701g. It’s Intel i910 graphics, for whatever that’s worth. On my desktop though, the 64-bit binary proprietary nVidia drivers are just excellent. The ATI drivers for my Thinkpad’s ATI X1300 stink the house, but I believe that’s common to all operating systems.

LWN has an interesting piece linking to Luis Villa’s blog about innovation on the desktop. There’s even a comment by our Jos there already. It parallels what we found with going to KDE4. It’s a post to make you think: how coordinated is our community and how much of the real problems are we solving? I can point to my own desktop and say: the real problems are solved for me . I don’t know if they’re solved for my mom, though, because I haven’t had to share an MS Word document with anyone for years (the advantages of doing a PhD in LaTeX, eh – yes, Kile is on my roadmap somewhere). And as I experiment more with Plasma, I find that it does add new useful functionality. But it’s a slow road to bring polish across the Free Software desktop and across platforms.

On the topic of brakes applied to innovation, one of the friendly GNOME folk at FOSS.in I spoke with described working on GNOME on OpenSolaris as “fun” because it seemed to be where Linux was five years ago: still open for experimentation and not locked in to expectations and backwards compatibility. Open for innovation, in other words.

In a totally different direction, the FSFE has published some new GPL-violations documents, in this case on how to report and fix them sensibly. Doing reporting right and not just shouting “fire!” is important. I know I’ve done my share of irresponsible reporting, and I’m done with it now.

Two more tidbits: the NLUUG Spring Conference on Filesystems and Storage still has its CfP open; I do want some semantic filesystem stuff in there, folks. There’s also the BSD community day in Utrecht this weekend. Be there or be .. well, be a happy and innovative Free Software developer anyway and show up because you care.

The Wayback Machine does not archive everything. Broken links are marked with a 💔.